Harris County, Texas – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is looking into claims that more than 100 people who are not U.S. citizens may have voted unlawfully in recent elections. This week’s announcement of the investigation centers on more than 200 votes that are believed to have been cast by people who are not citizens during the 2020 and 2022 elections.
Paxton emphasized the seriousness of the matter and said that keeping Texas elections transparent is still a major concern for his administration.
“Illegal aliens and foreign nationals must not be allowed to influence Texas elections by casting illegal ballots with impunity. I will not allow it to continue,” he said in a statement.
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Most of the suspected illegal votes were cast in Harris County, which is the largest county in Texas and includes Houston. Paxton’s office is also looking into alleged violations in Cameron, Guadalupe, and Eastland counties, though. The ongoing investigation is being conducted using data provided by the Texas Secretary of State, who first flagged the irregularities.
Paxton’s office has looked into voter fraud before, so this isn’t the first time. The Secretary of State told the Attorney General about 33 alleged noncitizen voters in June, and he started a separate investigation into them. The people in that case are alleged to have voted in the 2024 general election. Their immigration status was checked against the federal SAVE database, which keeps track of legal immigration and citizenship records.
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President Donald Trump’s executive order made it possible for states to use the SAVE database to check if voters are eligible. The order instructed the Department of Homeland Security to give states the tools they need to do this. Paxton said that injunction made it possible for Texas to aggressively go after examples of election fraud.
Paxton stated that even a small number of fraudulent ballots can hurt people’s belief in the political process, even if election fraud involving noncitizens is infrequent compared to the overall number of votes cast in the state. His administration has promised to look into each issue extensively and take legal action if they find that someone has broken the law.
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The Attorney General didn’t say when the current investigation would be over, but he did say that anyone who was found guilty of voting unlawfully as a noncitizen would be punished under state law.
